At first, I was a bit sceptical about the contents of this article. I like e-mail and prefer it over phone conversations, especially because of its asynchronous nature but after having read the article, I must say that he is spot on.
Turning off my e-mail client and taking advantage of the asynchronous nature of e-mail even more would probably boost my productivity a lot. Not being a programmer, I still recognize that in order to get something done one must really sit down uninterrupted to get _real_ work done. And having pointless e-mails popping up every once in a while _is_ needless interruptions.
Not exactly rocket science but once in a while one should make sure that technology is working for oneself and not (too much) the other way around.
Wow, one should have deep, deep respect for these people. The room for error is probably very small. When trying to patch substantial parts of the satellite's software the perils are obvious: any issues communication and stabilization might cause the loss of the spacecraft. And it is a bit difficult to reach the reset button...
Are there any means of going back to a safe version of the firmware, or are there means of automatically rebooting the on-board computer?
Is anything being reported about people on the ground. It is of course tragic for the crew of seven but they were professionals on duty, and I suppose that they have known and chosen the danger, whereas bystanders have made no such choice.
Okay, can you tell me (without looking it up) the difference between Paraguay and Uruguay?
Sure, no problem. Uruguay is the one by the Atlantic Ocean, Paraguay is the one which is land locked. Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, Ascuncion (sp?) of Paraguay. As far as I know, getting to Paraguay over land has not been that easy in the past.
How about Zaire and Zimbabwe?
No problem either. Zaire is now know as the "Democratic" Republic of Congo, or for those who cannot utter the word democratic and Congo in the same sentence: Congo-Kinshasa. As opposed to Congo-Brazzaville on the other side of the river. The country is the major supplier of coltan (a tantalum mineral) for your favourite PlayStation 2.
Zimbabwe is one the other side of the African continent (Eastern) bordering Mozambique to the south. Famous for its senile and coleric quasidictatorial führer Mugabe.
Honestly, I see a deep and fundamental difference between the attitude towards the diversity of the world's nations among the Americans I have met and the (mainly) Europeans I know and have met.
I cannot claim that there are not countries I would have difficulty to place on a map but then we are getting into the realm of small island nations in the Pacific etc. (Think I could find Nauru on an otherwise unmarked map.:-)
You say that you work at city. Do you mean Citi? (Citigroup). If this is the case, your misspelling makes me doubt that you really work in the finance industry.
He means exactly what he wrote. He works in "The City" which means London City, The Square Mile...
...remarks about the differences between weight and mass...
I am glad that you (helix400) did not get offended. Your original post was just so incorrect that my blood pressure surged and I had to comment. The trouble is that scientists are _very_ careful about these things. And it is in this that the beauty of the SI system lies more than the fact that it uses a base (10) compatible with our number system.
I had preferred that we had 12 fingers and used a duodecimal system but this is a bit too late to correct. However, the SI system makes the proper distinctions between all kinds of quantities and has means to construct appropriate units for all of them. On top of that is a system for forming practical units by means of prefixes. All in all, the best system available.
Your (helix400) original post was talking about the inevitable arbitrarity of systems of units. I agree. The only really nice and conceptually simple means of measuring is counting by means of natural numbers...
I believe that you are right. They misinterpret their experiment. This would break what is known as the Holevo bound, i.e. one bit of classical information per qubit. These people should probably read up on some quantum mechanics before they publish. (Or publish it in a journal where it is unlikely that anybody would know q.m. well enough to point out their fallacy - as they apparently did!)
Mass and volume are arbitarary in 2 ways. They rely off our arbitary meter, as well as the arbitary earth's gravity. A definition I've heard is that 1 cubic centimeter of water at sea level weights 1 gram and has a volume of 1 mL. Try taking a cubic centimeter of water to a different world, and you'll get different measurements.
There are reasons why scientists are very careful about the words they use. This is complete and utter nonsense.
I agree, however, that there will always be a degree of arbitrarity - at least with the current understanding of physics. Should some fancy-pancy theory emerge that let distances and/or time be quantized in a way that makes measuring a kin to counting, then the abitrary element will go away - but I bet that the scale will be utterly impractical.
Yeah. Because the whole AMU (atomic mass units) scale and all the other elements are based on the weight of the hydrogen atom, anyway.
No, this is misleading. There are several of these scales and they are getting confused all the time. There is a (approximate, counting) scale (sort of) based on the mass of the hydrogen atom. Then there are two serious scales: One - older - scale based on the average mass of naturally occuring oxygen. Another (modern and recommended) scale based on the mass of the carbon-12 nuclide.
The problem with the oxygen scale is that is ill-defined because of the variability of the isotope composition depending on the source. The carbon-12 scale is well-defined - and the basis of the SI unit one mole.
All of the stuff is amusing but some of it is actually a bit interesting. I'd like to see the work behind the literature prize. It is an interesting question to answer albeit not an earth shattering piece of science. Does improper high-lighting affect reading comprehension? Never thought of that...
What I would do and have done is to do my homework very thoroughly. Repeat your prior art search with wellthought out searches. Be very careful that you cover all relevant technical terms and beware that the terms used in patent documents can be very different from the terms used by people in your field. Write down the reasoning behind your searches on paper so that you and a patent attorney or examiner can understand that what you have done is correct. Put the time and effort into understanding patent classification systems. They are complicated but will help your search greatly. Identify aspects of your invention and classify them and search with terms and classes "diagonally", i.e. if your invention pertains to a razor mounted on a bicycle then search in the razor classes with the word bicycle and the other way around. Do this in both the USPTO and EPO systems (Espacenet).
Then you will end up with a pile of print-outs of patents that might or might not be relevant. Go through them one by one making sure that you understand them. For two reasons: Firstly, to find out if your invention is really new and what you actually invented. Secondly, because these patents are a good source of inspiration. You will discover new aspects of your invention that you will want to cover in your claims. You will also find out that there are patents that cannot be understood - period. I don't know what to do about them. Write a complete document to yourself and any patent people explaining why each of the existing patents are not in conflict with your invention. Remember to check in INPADOC what the status of the patents are if possible. Consider what discontinued applications can mean for your invention.
Now you have ammonition. Write up a set of draft claims modelled on the best and broadest of the patents you have read. Make sure that you realize that formulating claims is work for experts.
Write a detailed description of your invention covering every aspect that you can think of and that you have touched upon in your draft claims. Make the best drawings and the clearest text you can at all.
Clear your head for a week. Reread the text you have compiled and start negociating prices with patent people. Show them that you have done a lot of the tedious work for them and make sure that you get a significant discount.
I learned that just having the searches and then relevant patents printed out saved me a bundle. The attorney used Derwent to print out patents and that cost a part from time also $5 a patent. I had printed out the patents from the web for free from USPTO and Espacenet (+JPO). I cannot overemphasize the importance of doing a systematic search and documenting it. I decided to redo several days of work in a systematic fashion and got much more convincing results. Checking the references and examined documents in other patents is also very effective.
You can do a good job yourself but I would never trust myself to write the final claims myself.
It is sad when these things happen. A lot of people have put their careers in jeopardy by trying to keep up with these exciting "results".
Unfortunately, science is only a human activity so it is subject to all of the faults of people. The way the career and funding system works puts significant pressure on the shoulders of aspiring scientists and things like this will continue to happen. Fortunately, the peer review system managed to stop him in the end though it would have been a lot better if it had happened on day one.
The big dilemma is that science both has to be open to new (surprising?) results and extremely critical at the same time. Redoing an experiment can be incredibly hard and is always time consuming and expensive. A negative result is much too often no result at all.
Broken to a cryptographer means anything easier than brute-force. So in theory, this methed requires throwing less processor cycles at it than just totally random throwing, but it's still "just throwing processor cycles at it" in a sense.
Broken to an engineer means something that is reasonable to do that cracks the code. That this is not (yet).
Which definition does Microsoft use when describing said company's products?
Could anybody please explain to me in simple terms what these SEC adminstrative proceedings mean. I looked at the SEC page referred to but I didn't understand it. I'd be happy for an explanation understandable for somebody who is not familiar with legalize.
If the DHL jumbo and the Russian passenger Tupolev pilots had just followed their collision avoidance *systems*, over 70 people would have been alive today that aren't.
Can anybody confirm what I heard that had the pilots just let the TCAS system handle the situation by itself the autopilot would have adjusted the altitude correctly? If this is true the TCAS is pretty amazing. I hope it can do better than 99.999%.
One can't help thinking that it is a great pity that the question of one million dollars is going to block a 'photo opportunity' that might be otherwise be decades off.
It is true that Amalthea probably is a quite boring, small rock and there isn't much of scientific interest there but if we don't take the chance and get the data while we have a space probe out there then we mis opportunity to be surprised. Science involves a fair amount of "stamp collection" or "botany". A set of photos from Amalthea would fit in nicely here.
Where did he get the billion dollar estimate from? I see no direct correspondance between lines of code and monetary value.
He specifically talks about cost not value. But you are right that the correlation between sloc and cost is a non-trivial one. That is one reason why cost estimation is hard but it is far easier than guessing cost of a project before one has the source.
Could anybody explain to me why this is a result of switching to Linux rather than the result of changing hardware etc. I mean, I am quite ready to accept that there could be a speed increase under Linux but a factor of five is quite a lot.
And how much could they gain by using icc instead of gcc. This should be something that could give an important perfomance boost (though not a factor five, I guess).
The bridge is going to be 5 km long. How many kilometers will they be paying for? 10? 15 km? I take that the EU will contribute so one never know about the costs.
Re:All I want to know is..
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
I bet you're american. There ain't no world outside the good old US of A.... pathetic.
The "(please think before posting...)" didn't help you, did it? Look up Java on a map, then find the South Pacific.
PS. I am from a country you probably haven't heard of.
-- virve
Re:All I want to know is..
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
Islands in the South Pacific are more popular than caffeinated beverages (unlikely).
What has Java got to do with islands in the South Pacific?
Slashdot Mirror
Christ almighty. An april's dupe. This is beyond me. By the way, the Risks list does this RFC thing really well.
virve
--
At first, I was a bit sceptical about the contents of this article. I like e-mail and prefer it over phone conversations, especially because of its asynchronous nature but after having read the article, I must say that he is spot on.
Turning off my e-mail client and taking advantage of the asynchronous nature of e-mail even more would probably boost my productivity a lot. Not being a programmer, I still recognize that in order to get something done one must really sit down uninterrupted to get _real_ work done. And having pointless e-mails popping up every once in a while _is_ needless interruptions.
Not exactly rocket science but once in a while one should make sure that technology is working for oneself and not (too much) the other way around.
--
Wow, one should have deep, deep respect for these people. The room for error is probably very small. When trying to patch substantial parts of the satellite's software the perils are obvious: any issues communication and stabilization might cause the loss of the spacecraft. And it is a bit difficult to reach the reset button...
Are there any means of going back to a safe version of the firmware, or are there means of automatically rebooting the on-board computer?
virve
--
Is anything being reported about people on the ground. It is of course tragic for the crew of seven but they were professionals on duty, and I suppose that they have known and chosen the danger, whereas bystanders have made no such choice.
My condolences to the families of the crew.
But Mobilix is (well, was) a mobile phone company around here. Owned by France Telecom as far as I recall. Now it is called Orange.
Could this not have influence on this issue, i.e. that the name has been previously used without Obelix and his Gaul friends objecting?
Just a thought!
virve
--
Okay, can you tell me (without looking it up) the difference between Paraguay and Uruguay?
:-)
Sure, no problem. Uruguay is the one by the Atlantic Ocean, Paraguay is the one which is land locked. Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, Ascuncion (sp?) of Paraguay. As far as I know, getting to Paraguay over land has not been that easy in the past.
How about Zaire and Zimbabwe?
No problem either. Zaire is now know as the "Democratic" Republic of Congo, or for those who cannot utter the word democratic and Congo in the same sentence: Congo-Kinshasa. As opposed to Congo-Brazzaville on the other side of the river. The country is the major supplier of coltan (a tantalum mineral) for your favourite PlayStation 2.
Zimbabwe is one the other side of the African continent (Eastern) bordering Mozambique to the south. Famous for its senile and coleric quasidictatorial führer Mugabe.
Honestly, I see a deep and fundamental difference between the attitude towards the diversity of the world's nations among the Americans I have met and the (mainly) Europeans I know and have met.
I cannot claim that there are not countries I would have difficulty to place on a map but then we are getting into the realm of small island nations in the Pacific etc. (Think I could find Nauru on an otherwise unmarked map.
--
(snip)
You say that you work at city. Do you mean Citi? (Citigroup). If this is the case, your misspelling makes me doubt that you really work in the finance industry.
He means exactly what he wrote. He works in "The City" which means London City, The Square Mile...
--
...remarks about the differences between weight and mass...
I am glad that you (helix400) did not get offended. Your original post was just so incorrect that my blood pressure surged and I had to comment. The trouble is that scientists are _very_ careful about these things. And it is in this that the beauty of the SI system lies more than the fact that it uses a base (10) compatible with our number system.
I had preferred that we had 12 fingers and used a duodecimal system but this is a bit too late to correct. However, the SI system makes the proper distinctions between all kinds of quantities and has means to construct appropriate units for all of them. On top of that is a system for forming practical units by means of prefixes. All in all, the best system available.
Your (helix400) original post was talking about the inevitable arbitrarity of systems of units. I agree. The only really nice and conceptually simple means of measuring is counting by means of natural numbers...
--
I believe that you are right. They misinterpret their experiment. This would break what is known as the Holevo bound, i.e. one bit of classical information per qubit. These people should probably read up on some quantum mechanics before they publish. (Or publish it in a journal where it is unlikely that anybody would know q.m. well enough to point out their fallacy - as they apparently did!)
--
ARRRRGGHHH!
Mass and volume are arbitarary in 2 ways. They rely off our arbitary meter, as well as the arbitary earth's gravity. A definition I've heard is that 1 cubic centimeter of water at sea level weights 1 gram and has a volume of 1 mL. Try taking a cubic centimeter of water to a different world, and you'll get different measurements.
There are reasons why scientists are very careful about the words they use. This is complete and utter nonsense.
I agree, however, that there will always be a degree of arbitrarity - at least with the current understanding of physics. Should some fancy-pancy theory emerge that let distances and/or time be quantized in a way that makes measuring a kin to counting, then the abitrary element will go away - but I bet that the scale will be utterly impractical.
--
Yeah. Because the whole AMU (atomic mass units) scale and all the other elements are based on the weight of the hydrogen atom, anyway.
No, this is misleading. There are several of these scales and they are getting confused all the time. There is a (approximate, counting) scale (sort of) based on the mass of the hydrogen atom. Then there are two serious scales: One - older - scale based on the average mass of naturally occuring oxygen. Another (modern and recommended) scale based on the mass of the carbon-12 nuclide.
The problem with the oxygen scale is that is ill-defined because of the variability of the isotope composition depending on the source. The carbon-12 scale is well-defined - and the basis of the SI unit one mole.
--
All of the stuff is amusing but some of it is actually a bit interesting. I'd like to see the work behind the literature prize. It is an interesting question to answer albeit not an earth shattering piece of science. Does improper high-lighting affect reading comprehension? Never thought of that...
What I would do and have done is to do my homework very thoroughly. Repeat your prior art search with wellthought out searches. Be very careful that you cover all relevant technical terms and beware that the terms used in patent documents can be very different from the terms used by people in your field. Write down the reasoning behind your searches on paper so that you and a patent attorney or examiner can understand that what you have done is correct. Put the time and effort into understanding patent classification systems. They are complicated but will help your search greatly. Identify aspects of your invention and classify them and search with terms and classes "diagonally", i.e. if your invention pertains to a razor mounted on a bicycle then search in the razor classes with the word bicycle and the other way around. Do this in both the USPTO and EPO systems (Espacenet).
Then you will end up with a pile of print-outs of patents that might or might not be relevant. Go through them one by one making sure that you understand them. For two reasons: Firstly, to find out if your invention is really new and what you actually invented. Secondly, because these patents are a good source of inspiration. You will discover new aspects of your invention that you will want to cover in your claims. You will also find out that there are patents that cannot be understood - period. I don't know what to do about them. Write a complete document to yourself and any patent people explaining why each of the existing patents are not in conflict with your invention. Remember to check in INPADOC what the status of the patents are if possible. Consider what discontinued applications can mean for your invention.
Now you have ammonition. Write up a set of draft claims modelled on the best and broadest of the patents you have read. Make sure that you realize that formulating claims is work for experts.
Write a detailed description of your invention covering every aspect that you can think of and that you have touched upon in your draft claims. Make the best drawings and the clearest text you can at all.
Clear your head for a week. Reread the text you have compiled and start negociating prices with patent people. Show them that you have done a lot of the tedious work for them and make sure that you get a significant discount.
I learned that just having the searches and then relevant patents printed out saved me a bundle. The attorney used Derwent to print out patents and that cost a part from time also $5 a patent. I had printed out the patents from the web for free from USPTO and Espacenet (+JPO). I cannot overemphasize the importance of doing a systematic search and documenting it. I decided to redo several days of work in a systematic fashion and got much more convincing results. Checking the references and examined documents in other patents is also very effective.
You can do a good job yourself but I would never trust myself to write the final claims myself.
virve
--
It is sad when these things happen. A lot of people have put their careers in jeopardy by trying to keep up with these exciting "results".
Unfortunately, science is only a human activity so it is subject to all of the faults of people. The way the career and funding system works puts significant pressure on the shoulders of aspiring scientists and things like this will continue to happen. Fortunately, the peer review system managed to stop him in the end though it would have been a lot better if it had happened on day one.
The big dilemma is that science both has to be open to new (surprising?) results and extremely critical at the same time. Redoing an experiment can be incredibly hard and is always time consuming and expensive. A negative result is much too often no result at all.
virve
--
Broken to a cryptographer means anything easier than brute-force. So in theory, this methed requires throwing less processor cycles at it than just totally random throwing, but it's still "just throwing processor cycles at it" in a sense.
Broken to an engineer means something that is reasonable to do that cracks the code. That this is not (yet).
Which definition does Microsoft use when describing said company's products?
Could anybody please explain to me in simple terms what these SEC adminstrative proceedings mean. I looked at the SEC page referred to but I didn't understand it. I'd be happy for an explanation understandable for somebody who is not familiar with legalize.
virve
--
One of the Paris mirrors seems to have a "healthy" version - if one dares believe the info on checksums.
b a8a8 openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz
r ta ble/openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz
juan:~> md5sum openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz
459c1d0262e939d6432f193c7a4
ftp://ftp.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/po
If the DHL jumbo and the Russian passenger Tupolev
pilots had just followed their collision avoidance
*systems*, over 70 people would have been alive
today that aren't.
Can anybody confirm what I heard that had the pilots just let the TCAS system handle the situation by itself the autopilot would have adjusted the altitude correctly? If this is true the TCAS is pretty amazing. I hope it can do better than 99.999%.
--
virve
One can't help thinking that it is a great pity that the question of one million dollars is going to block a 'photo opportunity' that might be otherwise be decades off.
It is true that Amalthea probably is a quite boring, small rock and there isn't much of scientific interest there but if we don't take the chance and get the data while we have a space probe out there then we mis opportunity to be surprised. Science involves a fair amount of "stamp collection" or "botany". A set of photos from Amalthea would fit in nicely here.
--
virve
Where did he get the billion dollar estimate from? I see no direct correspondance between lines of code and monetary value.
He specifically talks about cost not value. But you are right that the correlation between sloc and cost is a non-trivial one. That is one reason why cost estimation is hard but it is far easier than guessing cost of a project before one has the source.
--
virve
Any information on availability? This is a feature I would want to pay money for. Getting those CD-labels looking right is always a pain.
And these embedded pictures look cool too...
--
virve
Could anybody explain to me why this is a result of switching to Linux rather than the result of changing hardware etc. I mean, I am quite ready to accept that there could be a speed increase under Linux but a factor of five is quite a lot.
And how much could they gain by using icc instead of gcc. This should be something that could give an important perfomance boost (though not a factor five, I guess).
Any insight would be appreciated.
virve
--
The bridge is going to be 5 km long. How many kilometers will they be paying for? 10? 15 km? I take that the EU will contribute so one never know about the costs.
I bet you're american. There ain't no world outside the good old US of A.... pathetic.
The "(please think before posting...)" didn't help you, did it? Look up Java on a map, then find the South Pacific.
PS. I am from a country you probably haven't heard of.
--
virve
Islands in the South Pacific are more popular than caffeinated beverages (unlikely).
;-)
What has Java got to do with islands in the South Pacific?
I am puzzled as often before.
--
virve
(please think before posting...)